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HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray Battle Over? Warner Switches to Blu-Ray

aristotle said:
There is a distinct difference between how people listen to music these days and how they watch movies. People want to be able carry their music with them and listen to songs over and over again.....
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Five years from now disk-based movies will be a niche market for those of us who want the very highest quality video and audio (1080p, lessless 7.1 audio). Most everyone else will be doing things like AppleTV rentals, Netflix download rentals, etc. The industry will figure out how to make it simple and attractive to consumers.

That's my prediction.

Personally, I don't feel the need to own movies and I think a lot of people are like that (look at Netfix's success). I just do because there's no good rental model for high quality downloadable movies. I have over 400 DVDs and have started my Blu-ray collection with about 20 disks, but I would be happier to just not have them and rent them on demand, if the quality and price are right (which they aren't yet).
 
aristotle said:
There is a distinct difference between how people listen to music these days and how they watch movies. People want to be able carry their music with them and listen to songs over and over again.

Movies however, are usually enjoyed by people in a home theatre setting sitting on a couch with a large TV or projector screen in front. None of the portable devices on the market are suitable for long term viewing or shared viewing.

I don't see a lot regular people wiring up their living rooms, buying extra hard drives to backup purchases and manage the whole thing. It's too geeky for the average person.

How would you show off your collection to other people? Come on, the reality is that collections require something physical that you can touch. I don't see downloads being used for anything other than rentals and in a small niche market.
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Agreed. I want hard copies of my content on pressed discs that I don't have to backup myself. Also...what about bonus content? Many people look at that as a big part of buying a DVD.
 
RaceTripper said:
Once all the ISPs get bandwidth and performance issues ironed out, physical media will likely become obsolete altogether. Blu-ray is quite possibly the last physical media based system for movie distribution. I'd be surprised if it lasts as long as DVD has. If it does, it'll be a niche product like LaserDisk was.
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I disagree. CDs will become obsolete far quicker than the video based medium (DVD, BR, HVD, ect...) And CDs are still here and will remain for a long long time. Physical media has a good 50 years left before it dies out.

You also forget that by the time there's enough bandwidth and cheap archival storage available for "everyone" to make downloadable HD movies realistically manageable, we'll already be into Extreme HD or whatever is next so we'll need even more bandwidth and storage for that.

Physical media is here to stay no matter how hard Apple and Microsoft try to kill it.
 
MacNut said:
Never happen, HD-DVD won't go down without a fight. I still see this war going on a while. From what I have heard HD still has a lot to offer. People seem to like the menus of HD-DVD better.
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First, HD-DVD has already gone down. Pending an official announcement from Paramount, only Universal will be left. It's over.

Second, when I'm looking for a movie, I don't choose one based on the menu. I choose the movie. I'm not going to pick up "Pirates of the Caribbean" on Blu-Ray and put it down because it has ****** menus. (I own both formats and admit the HD-DVD menus and pip commentary are cool).
 
janstett said:
First, HD-DVD has already gone down. Pending an official announcement from Paramount, only Universal will be left. It's over.

Second, when I'm looking for a movie, I don't choose one based on the menu. I choose the movie. I'm not going to pick up "Pirates of the Caribbean" on Blu-Ray and put it down because it has ****** menus. (I own both formats and admit the HD-DVD menus and pip commentary are cool).
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I think a lot of people want HD-DVD to succeed because of the better interface.

To me this whole "war" comes down to what company will spend more money to get studios to join rather then what is the better format.
 
MacNut said:
I think a lot of people want HD-DVD to succeed because of the better interface.
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I think if you look at the whole market (not just us geeky types), most people don't care because they don't know about the menu differences between formats. Hell, I don't really know myself because I've never seen a HD-DVD menu & until recently didn't know or care about differences between the two formats. What people really want is for there to be a single clear choice that isn't confusing.

Personally, I just want good movies with high quality.
 
More the reason why these companies should of worked together on a unified format.
 
I still think physical media will have a major role to play five years from now, and likely ten.

Where "digital downloads" will be most active will be over cable and satellite on-demand services to their boxes. They have the bandwidth to shove 720p and 1080i HD with multi-channel discrete audio to us now, and I imagine they can handle 1080p.

I just don't see internet-based systems like Netflix and iTunes being all that prevalent anytime soon. Sure, for us techno-Illuminati it's a cakewalk to set up an HPTC or :apple:tv and we likely have large pipes with no bandwidth caps. Plus we have "dedicated" home theater set-ups that can take advantage of the content and we don't mind spending months converting our physical media collections to digital.

But we are the exception, not the rule. And when everyone is shoveling down HD content over their cable or DSL internet connection, network performance is going to plummet unless the telcos and cable-cos invest in new ultra-high-bandwidth pipes (OC-1 to the home, anyone?) and that will cost significant amounts of money which means higher monthly prices which will impact adoption rates.
 
Isn't it something like 15% of the country on broadband. Not enough people are using it to make it worthwhile.
 
MacNut said:
More the reason why these companies should of worked together on a unified format.
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Considering how they all benefited from the decision to unify on the DVD standard, you would have thought they would do the same with it's successor, wouldn't you?
 
CWallace said:
Considering how they all benefited from the decision to unify on the DVD standard, you would have thought they would do the same with it's successor, wouldn't you?
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The easy answer is the PS3, Sony wanted the edge.
 
MacNut said:
The easy answer is the PS3, Sony wanted the edge.
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I suppose so. But SA-CD was such a revenue booster for them... ;)

Maybe everyone figured combi-players would have launched much earlier and worked a good deal better then they did and folks would be able to use both...
 
CWallace said:
It looks like anything beyond dial-up is considered broadband per the chart. So even 64kb ISDN would be classified as "broadband".
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That is the issue, cable companies are throttling down speeds, how are we going to get on demand movies if they are capping the numbers. To get it to look good you are going to need a huge pipe. I don't see people doing that.
 
MacNut said:
That is the issue, cable co.s are throttling down speeds, how are we going to get on demand movies if they are capping the numbers.
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A valid concern. And even if they don't, cable internet is a shared pool of bandwidth. The more folks using it, the slower it gets. I was the first person in my apartment complex to use Comcast Cable Internet and it was great. Now, a few years later, most of the complex has it (based on all the WiFi networks :D ) and performance fluctuates depending on the time of day as folks use it.
 
Don't forget that DSL is no where close to being up to speed to carry movies over the network.


Unless the whole country is wired with fiber it won't work.
 
Yup.

Which is why I think physical discs still have a decade or more left in them and the initial push to digital downloads will be to your cable or satellite receiver via their on-demand services over the video links and not over their internet links.
 
MacNut said:
Don't forget that DSL is no where close to being up to speed to carry movies over the network.


Unless the whole country is wired with fiber it won't work.
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Not sure I understand your point -- I've never had a problem retrieving streaming or download to own movies over DSL, from the likes of Cinemanow.com, XBOX360, iTunes and Movielink and over the years my broadband connection has varied from 768kbps SDSL to 6mbps ADSL. I specifically chose DSL because the speed does not fluctuate at all.

Broadband cable is "shared-bandwidth", meaning your speed is highly dependent on the amount of subscribers on the cable network.

I would think that cable would have a more difficult time handling a nation of movie downloaders.
 
The pipe is not as wide with DSL, so to download a 1080p movie would take a long time.
 
CWallace said:
I suppose so. But SA-CD was such a revenue booster for them... ;)
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It might have been had they bothered to market it. I saw almost zero penetration in mainstream B&Ms. Another problem, the extreme sampling requirements of 1-bit DSD made the players expensive compared to 24-bit/192kHz PCM.
 
MacNut said:
The pipe is not as wide with DSL, so to download a 1080p movie would take a long time.
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Sorry - I'm straying from the thread's subject.

it takes long over any type of internet connection. HD movies are, on average, a 5-9GB download at 720p. Cable's pipe isn't that much wider (especially when you factor in all the variables that bring a cable connection to it's knees), and it won't help when all cable TV networks go full HD.

Neither are anywhere near adequate for on-demand full HD over the internet. But both can handle SD just fine.
 
And that is the reason why internet distribution will never take off unless the infrastructure is completely rebuilt.
 
CWallace said:
Yup.

Which is why I think physical discs still have a decade or more left in them and the initial push to digital downloads will be to your cable or satellite receiver via their on-demand services over the video links and not over their internet links.
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Long live physical media!!! :D
 
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